Pope speaks to Muslims, others about faith

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Pope Benedict XVI holds a child in the crowd as he leaves the College
des Bernardins after delivering a speech on faith and culture to an
elite audience of 700 French intellectuals and artists, in Paris
Friday, Sept. 12, 2008. Pope Benedict XVI has arrived in France for a
four-day trip that will take him from Paris to the shrine in Lourdes.
(AP Photo/Benoit Tessier, Pool)

PARIS – Pope Benedict XVI denounced fundamentalist fanaticism as he addressed cultural figures, including Muslim leaders, at the start of a French pilgrimage Friday, which enflamed debate in Paris over the influence religion should have on politics.

In separate remarks, including in a speech to conservative French President Nicolas Sarkozy, Benedict encouraged a role for religion in shaping public policy, a stand that quickly enraged some of France’s staunch advocates of secularism.

His meeting later with representatives from the world of culture coincided with the second anniversary of his Regensburg, Germany, speech that incensed many in the Muslim world with its comments on Islam’s relation to violence.

Several Muslim leaders were among the 600 guests invited to listen to the pope in the College des Bernadins, a former monastery that was a temple of learning for medieval Christian monks.

The pope’s four-day sojourn in France is Benedict’s first here since he became pope in 2005. Papal spokesman the Rev. Federico Lombardi has said that the Muslims were invited to the speech as one of several groups of religious leaders the pope met with on Friday, with the anniversary of the Sept. 12, 2006, speech a coincidence.

Benedict met earlier in the day with French Jewish leaders. Later in the evening, Protestant representatives were scheduled to attend a prayer service led by the pope in Notre Dame cathedral. He told the Jews the Church condemns all forms of anti-Semitism and praised Jewish contribution to French politics, culture and arts.

The pontiff extended best wishes to the Muslim leaders for the holy season of Ramadan, but refrained from making any reference to his Regensburg speech. Benedict has said he regretted any offense that speech might have caused in the Muslim world.

At the end of the encounter, Benedict grasped the hands of the Muslim leaders as they approached him one by one and warmly greeted each one.

His speech explored dilemmas in society today, specifically the pulls between what he called “the poles of subjective arbitrariness and fundamentalist fanaticism.”

“It would be a disaster if today’s European culture could only conceive freedom as absence of obligation, which would inevitably play into the hands of fanaticism and arbitrariness,” Benedict said.

The pope also warned that any banishing of questions dealing with God to the realm of the unscientific would be a “disaster for humanity.”

“What gave Europe’s culture its foundation – the search for God and the readiness to listen to him – remains today the basis of any genuine culture,” the pope concluded.

Muslim leaders said they were impressed by the pope’s high-flying intellectual discourse but said they would have liked to hear concrete answers to the divide between Muslim and Christian communities.